Design of plasmonic nanoparticles for increasing efficiency and absorptance in thin-film solar cells

Plasmonic structures are desirable methods of improving localized light absorption and improving the performance of thin solar cells. The metal nanostructures control light concentration and trap at a submicrometric scale. This paper presents a metal-insulator-metal waveguide for improving solar cell absorption and efficiency. According to the obtained results, the proposed method achieved high absorption compared to the previous methods. We use the combination of the Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) algorithm with the Binary-Coupled Dipole Approximation (BCDA). A three-dimensional BCDA model can be used to model metal nanoparticles with nonperiodic structures. We use this combination to find the best array of nanoparticles. Note, in this design, the angle of incidence is necessary to increment the absorption. This increment is 60% with 65 degrees of incidence. Also, according to this increment of absorption, the proposed method achieved 55% higher performance than the previous methods.